Superheroes

 

All Saints

Happy All Saints Day! I hope you all had a fun and safe All Hallows Eve last night. Did you have a lot of trick or treaters? Every year there is a theme to the costumes based on the popular movies and shows. There are always a lot of superheroes. All the families with little kids, how many superheroes were there? How many Spider Mans, Ironmans, Batmans, Elsas? How many of your kids dressed up as saints? Not too many, but that’s ok, because just as last night may have been all about superheroes, so is today.

Who are your heroes?

You can tell a lot about a person by who their heroes are, and we all have them. There’s something innate in us to want to emulate and honor people we admire and who have influenced us. Our heroes come from our own interests and how we want to see ourselves. We think of sports heroes, because we want to associate ourselves with and see ourselves as winners, as people who work hard, do their best, and excel in certain endeavors. We may have heroes in business, be they the titans of industry or our mentors or people who have had a positive influence on our lives and careers. We have social heroes or political heroes, those who have stood for values we share.

Most of these people we will never meet nor have any meaningful interaction with, but we still want to identify with them. And if given the chance we would love to meet them and get their advice on how we could be more like them, how we can be better at what we do and who we are by following their example.

When we honor them, we are actually honoring that part of them we want to be. We are in a way honoring ourselves. Their specialness makes us feel special.

We just had the World Series. So many people in the stands were wearing their team jerseys, often with players’ names on them. None of those fans will ever be professional baseball players or play in the championship, but they identify with their team because it’s their team, it’s their city. And even if their team wasn’t in the Series this year, they still rooted for the Brewers, because Americans love the underdog, and we were pulling for them because they had never won before.

We love to see excellence. We love to see people struggle and overcome hardship and overwhelming odds. Everyone loves a winner.

That doesn’t mean we worship them.

One thing I had never experienced before listening to Justin Hibbard’s Why Catholic podcast is the major problem so many protestants have with praying to the saints. They believe that there are saints in heaven, but there is no real connection to them. They’re there, we’re here. They’ve made it, we want to make it. It’s almost like they’re in heaven so we don’t share the same life. We’re alive but they’re … something else.

I’ve never understood that. All throughout scripture we read that God is the God of the living, not the dead. We believe in eternal life, and it’s natural for us to commemorate the dead and honor what they did in this life. The dead live on in our memories and oftentimes feel as close to us now as they did then. We live in our memories and cherish them. We say that the dead still live in our hearts. Isn’t that a great understanding of eternal life, how we can experience heaven here on earth?

But they say they want to pray directly to Jesus, without anyone in between. They see our artwork and our statues and hear our prayers and somehow equate that with praying to them as themselves. And don’t even talk about relics, all those gross old body parts and such. They don’t understand that there’s a difference between honoring and having a devotion to a saint and blurring the line between that and forgetting who we are actually praying to. We do not take part in hero worship nor hold to superstition.

Why wouldn’t we ask them to pray for us? We ask the saints to pray for us, to pray with us, to the same Jesus, to the same Father, in the same Spirit. If we truly believe in eternal life, that there is a heaven, then it makes sense that there is a communion of saints, that there is a connection between those in heaven and those on earth.

The church militant, the church suffering and the church triumphant. These are the stages we all go through on our path to salvation. We’re the ones battling it out here on earth, working out our salvation with fear and trembling and hope. St. Paul actually referred to us as saints. There are those who the Church has officially declared to be in heaven by how they lived their lives. And there are those who we say are in purgatory, who will eventually experience the beatific vision in heaven after a state of purification. Those are the people we remember tomorrow, All Souls Day. All are considered saints and all can be our heroes. I think it’s easier for us to consider those who have died as saints, but we’re saints, too. Do you consider yourself a saint? Is that something you aspire to? Do you see the people around you as saints? A lot of times I think we see that as being presumptuous. Sainthood is a reward or something, not a way of living.

Have you ever asked anyone to pray for you? Have you ever had anyone ask you to pray for them? Of course you have. Your attitude towards the saints is really about your understanding about what it means to be Church and what prayer is. We pray for others out of love for them. We always want the best for those we love, and prayer is the foundation of all we do for the love of others. And we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t think it was effective, if prayer didn’t make a difference. God wants us to pray for one another. We actually have a responsibility to pray for one another, wherever they are.

And do you pray for the dead? It’s a forgotten art. Pray for the repose of their souls. Blessed Fulton Sheen said “As we enter Heaven, we will see them, so many of them, coming towards us and thanking us. We will ask who they are, and they will say ‘a poor soul you prayed for in Purgatory.’ I once asked a priest how long I should pray for the repose of the souls of my parents, because what if they have left purgatory and are in heaven? They wouldn’t need our prayers anymore.  He said to never stop because prayer is outside of time, so when we pray for them in purgatory, we are praying for them while they are still alive, and vice versa.  It was a bit mind blowing.

So, who are your heroes? How do you choose them? It’s important that our heroes are good examples, people who live or have lived lives of virtue and holiness. Rank your heroes by what’s truly important. Baseball players are great, but they won’t necessarily help you get to heaven. It’s interesting that the gospel today is the beatitudes. We read this at weddings and at funerals also. Weddings because they are the foundation for a solid happy marriage and provide the conditions for the couple to get to heaven. At funerals because these are the standards that everyone will be judged by, and we recall how the deceased lived by them. Judge your heroes by the beatitudes and you can’t go wrong. Live by them and you will become a hero to other people. You will be a saint.

What type of hero do you want to be? Are you just trying to “be a good person”, or do you want to be something more? What have you done to be considered heroic? What example have you given that someone would want to emulate? Who do you want to be a hero to? Most of us would want our children and grandchildren to think of us as heroes, but what about everyone else? Do people see the saint in you?

Just as we have been influenced by the examples of those in heaven we have never met, so too you have been a hero to people you have never met or do not remember. So many of the things we do for people that we feel are insignificant or ordinary have such a profound effect that they can help them to heaven. How many saints have you made?

I think we make a lot of saints here at St. Mary’s. I know we make a lot of disciples. You met some of them. Today we welcomed some new folks into the church militant through the beautiful Rite of Entrance. They have become members of the church as catechumens, not yet fully in communion with us but part of the Church, nonetheless. We signed all their senses and claimed them for Christ. They also have their heroes. Some have developed a devotion to a patron saint, and some have come here because they were invited by a hero here on earth, someone like you. Let us pray that these saints continue to grow in faith and love of Christ and his Church.